An athletic-looking figure in black riding leathers and a black helmet with a full face visor dismounted, removed a slim black briefcase from one of the saddlebags, and approached the door. He knocked firmly with a black-gloved hand.
That was when Gurney, about to ease the gun from his pocket, recognized the helmet.
It was his own, from his motorcycling days nearly three decades earlier. It was the helmet he’d given to Kyle a few months ago.
He flipped on the inside lights and opened the door.
“Hey, Dad!” Kyle handed him the briefcase, lifted off the helmet with one hand, and ran the other back through the short dark hair that was a mirror image of his father’s.
They exchanged matching smiles, although in Gurney’s there was a touch of bafflement. “Did I miss an email or a phone message?”
“About my coming up? No. It was a spur-of-the-moment kind of thing. Thought I could take care of your video enhancement easier up here than at home—so you can see what I’m doing and we can get it the way you want it. That’s the main reason I came. But there’s a second reason, too.”
“Oh?”
“Cow-shit bingo.”
“Excuse me?”
“Cow-shit bingo—at your Summer Mountain Fair. Did you know that was an actual thing? And deep-fried cheese. And on Sunday afternoon, a ladies-only demolition derby event. And a giant zucchini hurling contest.”
“A what?”
“I made that last one up. But what the hell, it’s not as weird as the real stuff. I’ve never been to a real country fair. With real cow shit. Figured it was time. Where’s Madeleine?”
“Long story. She’s staying with a couple of her friends. Involves the fair and … sort of a precaution. I’ll tell you all about it later.” He stepped back, holding the door open. “Come in, come in, take off the bike suit and get comfortable. Have you had any dinner?”
“A burger and a yogurt at the Sloatsburg rest stop.”
“That was over a hundred miles ago. You want to have an omelet with me?”
“Cool. Thanks. I’ll get my other bag and change.”
“So, what’s this ‘precaution’ thing you mentioned?” No surprise to Gurney, that was the first question Kyle asked when they sat down to eat twenty minutes later.
Instead of downplaying the threat, which would be his natural inclination, Gurney recounted the attack on Hardwick’s house and the atrocity in Cooperstown in straightforward terms. If he was going to have to persuade Kyle to leave—for home or another safe place, at least by the following morning—it would make no sense to soft-pedal the peril now.
As Gurney spoke, his son listened with silent concern—as well as the visible excitement that a hint of danger often arouses in young men.
After they ate, Kyle set up his laptop on the dining table and Gurney gave him the USB drive with the Axton Avenue video files. They located the two short segments Gurney wanted enhanced. The first was the portion of the cemetery sequence beginning with Carl rising from his chair and ending with him sprawled face-down with a bullet in his brain. The second was the portion of the street sequence that showed the diminutive figure Gurney believed to be Petros Panikos entering the building with the gift-wrapped box that presumably contained the rifle later found upstairs in the apartment.
Kyle was studying the images on his computer screen. “You want these blown up for max detail with minimum software interpolation?”
“Say that again?”
“When you blow stuff up, you spread out the actual digital data. The image gets bigger but also fuzzier, because there’s less hard information per square inch. Software can compensate for that by making assumptions, filling in the data gaps, sharpening, smoothing. But that introduces an element of unreliability in the image because not everything in the enhancement is present in the original pixels. In order to de-fuzz the enlargement, the software makes calculated guesses based more on probability than on hard data.”
“So what are you recommending?”
“I’d recommend picking a point of reasonable compromise between the sharpness of the enlargement and the reliability of the data composing it.”
“Fine. Aim for whatever balance you think is right.” Gurney smiled not only at his son’s grasp of the process but also at the excitement in his voice. He seemed the happy archetype of that under-thirty generation born and bred with a natural affinity for all things digital.
“Just give me a little time to mess around with a few test runs. I’ll let you know when I have something worth looking at.” Kyle opened the program’s toolbar, clicked on one of the zoom icons, then stopped. He looked over at Gurney, who was carrying their omelet dishes to the sink island, and asked a question that seemed to come out of nowhere.
“Apart from dealing with sensational murders and things, how’re you guys doing up here?”
“How are we doing? Okay, I guess. Why do you ask?”
“Seems like you’re involved in your stuff, and Madeleine’s involved in her stuff.”
Gurney nodded slowly. “I guess you could say that. My stuff and her stuff. Generally separate, but mostly compatible.”
“You like it that way?”
He found the question oddly difficult to answer. He finally said, “It works.” But he was uncomfortable with the mechanical tone of that. “I don’t mean it to sound so gray and pragmatic. We love each other. We still find each other attractive. We enjoy living together. But our minds work differently. I get into something and just sort of stay in it. Madeleine has a way of changing her focus, of paying total attention to whatever’s in front of her—adapting to the moment. She’s always present, if you know what I mean. And, of course, she’s a hell of a lot more outgoing than I am.”
“Most people are.” Kyle took the negative edge off the comment with a big grin.
“True. So, most of the time, we end up doing different things. Or she ends up doing things and I end up thinking about things.”
“You mean she’s outside feeding the chickens while you’re sitting in here figuring out who chopped up the body in the town dumpster?”
Gurney laughed. “That’s not exactly it. When she’s at the clinic she deals with what’s there—some pretty horrific stuff—and when she’s here she deals with what’s here. I tend to be inside my head, obsessed with some ongoing problem, regardless of where I am. That’s one difference between us. Also, Madeleine spends a lot of time looking, learning, doing. I spend a lot of time wondering, hypothesizing, analyzing.” He paused, shrugged. “I suppose each of us does what makes us feel most alive.”
Kyle sat for a while with a thoughtful frown, as if trying to align his mind with his father’s to better understand his thoughts. Finally he turned back to his computer screen. “I better get started on this, in case it turns out to be harder than I thought.”
“Good luck.” Gurney went into the den and opened his email. His eye ran down through the two dozen or so items that had arrived since that morning. One item caught his attention. The sender was identified simply as “Jonah.”
The email text appeared to be a personal response to Gurney’s request for a meeting to discuss the status of the investigation.
I would be interested in having the proposed discussion as soon as possible. My location, however, would make a physical meeting at this time impractical. My suggestion is that we meet via Internet video-phone tomorrow morning at 8:00 a.m. If you would like to proceed this way, please email me your video-phone service name. If you do not already have this in place, you can download the software from Skype. I look forward to your response.